Café
au cougar
_ Turning Houston into America’s next coffee capital
by David Raffetto ('05)
As a young, ambitious engineering student at theUniversityofHouston, CarlosdeAldecoa(’97)wouldsitinthesmall Mexican food restaurant at the corner of Cullen and Milby, textbooks and old patent files strewn across the table, and stare at the Maxwell House coffee plant across the street. Many will remember the plant’s giant, neon coffee cup—a sort of beacon for residents of Houston’s East End neighborhood. But for de Aldecoa, those neon ions were burning their way into his consciousness, illuminating his future. ¶ Today, the de Aldecoa family owns that same plant under the name Maximus Coffee Group—but it’s not really the same plant at all. Within those one million square-feet is the most complex coffee production facility in the world. And one of the largest. So grab a cup of joe, settle in, and read how de Aldecoa is turning Houston into the country’s next coffee capital, one bean at a time.
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brewing a company
In 1928, Carlos’ grandfather and namesake started a coffee roasting and grinding operation in Madrid, Spain. In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the family fled to Mexico, where their operation expanded in the 1940s to include farming and milling. In the 1990s, the company moved its operations to Houston, purchasing the old Uncle Ben’s rice plant off Clinton and converting it to a green coffee silo operation. “When our silo facility was up and running, I approached trade houses in New York, England, and Switzerland,” de Aldecoa remembers, “only to find we couldn’t compete with other storage facilities. At the time, Harris County placed a three percent ad valorem tax on all inventory held at year end. So the trade houses would instead store their coffee in places like Antwerp and Barcelona where they wouldn’t have to pay that three percent.” In 2004, de Aldecoa worked with the Port of Houston, the City of Houston, and state legislators to pass a constitutional amendment that exempted green coffee stored in Harris County from that ad valorem tax. 6 | Spring 2010
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“As soon as that tax fell, our business boomed,” de Aldecoa said. “Houston had always been well represented from a roaster's stand point—the Maxwell House plant for 60 years, the Sara Lee plant on Navigation for over 40 years—but despite having the country’s largest foreign tonnage port, we were never considered a viable coffee port. Now, we’ve passed New York and New Orleans as the country’s largest importer of coffee. We’ve grown ten-fold over the past three years alone.” From the moment de Aldecoa and Maximus Coffee Group moved to Houston, they were supplying the Maxwell House plant with green coffee. Obviously, proximity between the facilities—all of five miles—made transporting the product from the silos to the roasting plant quite economical. But de Aldecoa’s company offered Maxwell House a revolutionary way to keep costs even lower. Usually, coffee enters the US in 150-pound, hand-sewn, burlap bags. About 300 bags will fit in a 20-foot container that has to be unloaded by hand, put on pallets, and moved. Instead, take that same 20-foot container, add a liner, and blow in 40,000 pounds of coffee. The increased product per volume and reduced labor made Maximus Coffee Group a force in the coffee importing business. At one point, Maxwell House had 70% of the US market, but as private label brands continued to grow, the plant was only running at 40% of its capacity. Kraft Foods, who then owned the facility, was seriously considering shutting it down. “As far as I’m concerned, this was the Taj Mahal of coffee plants,” de Aldecoa said. “It wasn’t going to shut down as long as I was around. We put together a proposal to buy the plant, acquire the assets, and transfer all of the employees. Kraft accepted. I feel so fortunate to now own a plant that, well, rather literally, I’ve looked up to since I was a young man. And probably most important, we kept over 400 jobs and around twenty million in wages in Houston.”
Sip Down These Specs De Aldecoa wasn’t the first person to have purchased the facility. In fact, Maxwell House originally bought it from Ford, who from 1914-1942 used the space to manufacture automobiles. But it’s been roasting coffee ever since. But roasting is only a small part of what the plant is now capable of. Operating 24 hours per day, it roasts, it grinds, and it packs coffee through its high pressure (up to 4,500 pounds per square inch), high temperature, and high voltage systems. It’s one of only three plants in the US that uses an extraction and spray-dry method to produce instant coffee. Perhaps most heralded by industry leaders, it is the only chemical-free decaffeinated coffee producer in North America. “Most people drink decaffeinated coffee for health reasons, but in most cases, they’re only